Tag Archives: Colin Kaepernick

Black Women Whose Name Should Be a Household Word: An Ongoing Series

Laurie and Debbie say:

Until today, neither of us had ever heard of Eroseanna Robinson, who should be on stamps and statues and college curricula.

Who was she?

We found her in an article by Amira Rose Davis for Zora, Medium’s forum for posts and thoughts by and about people of color. Davis looks first at Robinson’s refusal to stand for the national anthem at the 1959 Pan-American Games in Chicago, 60 years ago.

As the U.S. national anthem started to play, the crowd inside Soldier Field rose to its feet in excitement. But high jumper Eroseanna “Rose” Robinson stayed sitting. The track and field athlete was not here for the bloated displays of American greatness. To her, the anthem and the flag represented war, injustice, and hypocrisy.

Robinson’s decision, 60 years ago, was the forerunner of many meaningful protests by Black athletes, including Colin Kaepernick’s very similar decision to “take a knee” in 2016. Kaepernick may or may not have known about Robinson’s refusal to stand; he was certainly picking up her legacy. We hope he will be more widely remembered for his bravery than she is for hers: in 1959 (before the Civil Rights Movement caught fire, before the Voting Rights Act began to change the country). She was going against an unchallenged white supremacy to a degree difficult to imagine in 2019.

Once Davis goes into Robinson’s biography, however, we can hardly be surprised at this one act of bravery:

When Robinson moved to Cleveland to work in a community center, she started to get heavily involved with their local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). By 1952, she was a leader within the small chapter and led a direct-action protest at a segregated skating rink. Historian Victoria Wolcott writes about the Skateland protest in her book, Race, Riots and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America, where she details the fact that Robinson led “skate-ins” on multiple nights and used her skating skills to forcibly integrate the popular skating rink. In the rink, Robinson drew the bulk of the attention and animosity of the White patrons and eventually even sustained a broken arm from the abuse.

The pattern of determined bravery continues:

… just six months after sitting for the anthem at the Pan Am Games, Robinson was arrested on charges of tax evasion over the amount of $386. When brought before the judge, she refused to pay, citing the U.S. government’s propensity for violence and war. “If I pay income tax, I am participating in that destruction,” Robinson said. The judge sentenced her to a year and a day in jail. While in jail, Robinson engaged in a hunger strike refusing to eat or drink. She became so weak that they had to carry her in and out of the courtroom and attempted to feed her intravenously. Her hunger strike garnered national attention as hundreds of protesters and letters of support poured in to support the “athlete wasting away in prison.”

She remained an activist until her death in 1976, and went on at least one more hunger strike, when she and friends were turned away from a segregated restaurant in Maryland.

Davis’s post also follows some important history of protest by Black athletes, including some historic analysis of its patterns. It’s all important, and it’s all worth reading. But before you dive in, just take some time to remember and appreciate Rose Robinson’s courage, conviction, and steadfastness.

Say her name.

Thanksgiving 2018: Hope Is Staying Alive

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Laurie and Debbie say:

For the first ten years of this blog, we wrote a Thanksgiving post, listing good things that had happened in the year since the previous Thanksgiving. (We know the shameful history of Thanksgiving very well; we also like taking stock of good things.)

In 2016, less than three weeks out from Trump’s election, we couldn’t bring ourselves to write that post. Instead, we wrote about how we were feeling, and how we were redirecting the blog in resistance. In 2017, we wrote about some of the myriad of places where we saw hopeful possibility. We also said about 2017, “the catalogue of atrocities, cruelties, threats, and stupidities of the current White House and Congress is amazingly long.” Needless to say, that is still true.

But …

One of our examples was Colin Kaepernick and #takeaknee . That movement has, in some ways, gone quiet, suppressed by team owners, but it is not dead. Since our last Thanksgiving blog, Kaepernick has been named an Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience, and has won the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award given by Sports Illustrated. (Oh, and something from Harvard University, too). Far more important, Kaepernick has changed the national conversation in a way that will continue to reverberate for some time; almost no one looks at a line of ball players singing the National Anthem the same way they used to. Sure, some of the conversation is negative, even very negative, but a lot of it is positive, and passionate. And it’s spreading, including to South Africa,

We also talked about Reverend William Barber II and his moral movement. In 2018, Barber won a Macarthur “Genius Grant” — and got arrested the same day it was announced, supporting workers demanding union rights in Chicago. His movement also put a great deal of effort into Get Out the Vote work in North Carolina earlier this month.

Then there’s #metoo, the earthquake that just keeps going. A year ago we said “No one knows how it will shake out” and that is still true. However, we do know that it hasn’t stopped shaking the world, and shows no sign of stopping. Yes, it’s had failures, including the very high-profile and disheartening failure of the U.S Senate to believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. It has also had hundreds, if not thousands, of successes and — like #takeaknee — it has changed the conversation, everywhere. We find it especially encouraging that, while women of color and women in minimum wage jobs are still at greater risk, that conversation is also happening everywhere, sometimes with excellent results.

No one wanted this year to bring us the Parkland students’ movement for school safety and gun-ownership restrictions, including #boycottnra, but that intrepid, tactically brilliant group has made extraordinary progress, and gained the visibility they deserve.

The midterm elections are getting some mainstream press as “mixed results,” or “tepid Democratic victory,” but the truth is that they were not only a blue wave, they were a black and brown and female wave, and they represent an entirely new force in mainstream American politics.  Here’s one overview article, and a few high points:

  • The first two Native Americans ever elected to national office (both women);
  • The first two Muslim-American women ever elected to the House of Representatives;
  • Three new black lawmakers, including a mother who became politically active when her son was murdered in a hate crime*;
  • Seven additional Hispanic members of the House of Representatives; and
  • A record number of women in the Senate, including the first Latinx woman senator.

State legislatures and governors show similar gains. The U.S. has its first openly gay male governor. We have literally never seen a Congress or statehouses like this before. Likely results include: 1) stemming the Trump administration tide at least somewhat, including the fact that the House of Representatives can cut off the money; 2) encouraging many more women, people of color, and LGBTQ people to run next time, and to pay attention to state and local government; 3) changing the paradigm, as Barber, Kaepernick, and the Parkland students (among many others) are doing.

It’s important to mention here that some high-profile losses, like Stacey Abrams’ bid for governor of Georgia and Andrew Gillum’s for governor of Florida, are causing progressives in those states to turn up the gain. Abrams has announced Free Fight Georgia, and she’s a force to be reckoned with. Florida is newly able to change itself, because even in a year when the Republicans took the state offices, 60% of Floridians voted to restore voting rights to 1.4 million Florida citizens who have served their terms as felons in prison, and are now back on the street. Many other important progressive state ballot initiatives passed, including one that will require a unanimous jury of folks in Louisiana to convict on a felony. (Oregon is now the only state where 10 jurors can do that.) Enough power to fix gerrymandering has changed in at least four states–Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado.  Just as with the Florida voting rights victory, this opens the way to change the game for the next election.

Look for a 2019 full of Republican atrocities, yes. But also look at the growing ways we have at our fingertips — not only to fight back, but to make end runs around the haters, and create real change.

Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate!

Follow Debbie on Twitter. 

*We originally had this incorrect as a death by police violence. Thanks to Lisa for the correction.